It's difficult to be a choreographer on a mission. Your movement, no matter how original, runs the risk of being subsumed by meaning. Your architecture has a good chance of crumbling under the weight of intent. Kelley Donovan, in the six pieces in this show, makes a Herculean effort to avoid those pitfalls, while also making clear in her thematic choices and even her program notes that she crafts dances about ''transformation, healing and women's history.'' Her success at the endeavor is mixed.

Kelley Donovan’s work is rooted in abstraction the old modern-dance way. You don’t come right out and dance your feelings or your personality because that would be egotistical. And if you dance about something else, you can’t be literal or pantomimic. The solution, for Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and the founders of the only serious alternative to ballet in the 20th century, was abstraction. The dancer extrapolates out physically from a real gesture or discharge of emotions so that the movement engages the whole body, but the original action is there only as a phantom, an inkling, a metaphor. Think Picasso’s guitars.

Kelley Donovan began her new piece, Visceral Threads, with a solo Friday night at the Dance Complex. Moving down a diagonal with large swoops and curves of her torso and scooping, spiraling arms, she spun a theme that the seven other dancers took apart and worked on for the rest of the piece.....Without taking away anything particularly high-minded, I enjoyed it for the richness of the movement and the pleasure of seeing how a compositional process can develop.

Sinuous ‘Forgotten’ is rich with imageryBlink, and you could almost miss it. But the creative seeds for Kelley Donovan’s new evening-length dance “It’s All Forgotten Now” begin to germinate in the choreographer/dancer’s brief opening solo.

Though it seems to go by in a heartbeat, it’s a blistering microcosm of the whole piece, and it’s all about transformation.

Donovan’s troupe lets go kinetically....Set to a collage of electronic noise and muttering, “Inside of the Ending” is a somber piece, and like many of Donovan’s dances, it doesn’t so much develop as unfurl in a fluid stream of energy subverted by quick changes of mood and dynamic, like a flow of water interrupted by something passing through it, the flick of a finger or a whole hand.

Signals from the solar system - Daniel McCusker at Tufts, Kelley Donovan at the Dance Complex

....Triadic Memories is the name of a 1981 piano piece by Morton Feldman. Donovan used 45 minutes of this long-duration work, the selection played at the edge of the Dance Complex studio space by dance critic and musician Theodore Bale. There was nothing easy or obvious about her musical choice, and it was not always clear how and why Donovan had aligned particular patterns to the chimes and splintered chords of the score.

Challenging moves....[Kelley] Donovan is living her dream, choreographing and staging new works in New York for her own company Kelley Donovan & Dancers..... "Larger-bodied than most professional dancers," a Times critic wrote this year, "she turned that into a sculptural asset through her gorgeously fluid, strongly rooted movement. . . . Ms. Donovan felt like a force of nature."

"Borrowed Bones," the piece she did in New York, comes to Cambridge's Dance Complex this weekend.

The movement is pure in Donovan's 'Borrowed Bones'In last night's Boston premiere of the work by Donovan and her nine excellent New York dancers ... the underlying context was subtle. You could see it mostly in the use of torso energy that seems headed in one direction while the limbs reach elsewhere, a kind of holding on and releasing at the same time....

Sticks and bones - Kelley Donovan at the Dance Complex...Kelley Donovan's Borrowed Bones at the Dance Complex last weekend featured Donovan and nine accomplices in 40 minutes of intense dancing. The piece transcended the ordinary in a couple of important ways. First of all, Donovan's movement, as attested by three solos studding the piece, is lush and lyrical. Few choreographers today have such a clear sense of space and continuity.

Choreographer Kelley Donovan knows about impermanence and transformation, the themes of her latest work, “Made of Paper.’’ After years as one of the most vibrant choreographers on the Boston scene, she moved to New York, regrouping with a new set of dancers. Yet she still maintains close ties here, coming back periodically to teach and present new work.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests

You cannot post new topics in this forumYou cannot reply to topics in this forumYou cannot edit your posts in this forumYou cannot delete your posts in this forumYou cannot post attachments in this forum